Bluelock, the Indianapolis “disaster-recovery-as-a-service” startup, has been acquired by InterVision, a managed IT consultancy headquartered in St. Louis, MO, and Santa Clara, CA. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Bluelock CEO Christopher Clapp says he and one of the company’s founders will be using Bluelock’s sale “as an opportunity to do a graceful exit.” The rest of Bluelock’s 60-person team will join the new organization, he says.
“The intent is to make [Bluelock’s Indiana office] an operating center and grow product lines and the headcount,” Clapp says. “It’s a great opportunity and a strong culture fit between companies.”
Bluelock was founded in 2006 to offer customers managed IT infrastructure services. Once cloud computing technologies started to mature earlier this decade, Bluelock began offering a service that replicated a customer’s entire data center in real time and moved it over to the cloud. That set up allows users to recover quickly after a natural disaster without data loss or the hassle of sending backup tapes to a secure vault and then copying them back into the production environment, Clapp says.
InterVision is a portfolio company of Huron Ventures, a Detroit VC firm. InterVision “started [as] a Santa Clara-based provider of technology sales and some professional services,” Clapp explains. “That company combined with one in St. Louis to expand the range of services. They can sell or manage IT services. Or, if you want to migrate to the public cloud, InterVision wants to help.”
InterVision was interested in Bluelock because it identified disaster recovery as a growth area of IT services. Clapp says disaster recovery as a service is becoming more mainstream, with 20 percent year-over-year growth. “They looked at the leaders, spotted us, and put us at the top of the list,” Clapp says. “They approached us in the fall and made a compelling case for combining companies.”
In a statement, InterVision CEO Aaron Stone said, “Bluelock is an accomplished provider and one of the most sought after brands in the fast-growing disaster recovery space.”
The bottom line, Clapp says, is that Bluelock brings new products to InterVision, and the 200-person InterVision team has a brings a bigger staff and range of product offerings to Bluelock’s customers. Both companies, he adds, take a “client-centered” approach.
As for what Clapp has planned for his next adventure, he says, “I haven’t even been able to think past this moment in time. I’m going to take some time off—I’m not in a rush to go back to work full time.”
